Pandemic lockdowns are frustrating, but they also create room for quiet reflection. I spent the 2020 lockdown at home, and I spent the 2022 Shanghai lockdown confined to my dorm. During those periods I read a great deal and also reconsidered many questions we usually take for granted: questions about learning, work, and the kind of life I want to live. Living in the present can feel fulfilling and liberating, but if some questions are not considered early enough, it is easy to drift with the current. The pandemic gave me a chance to pull myself out of daily busyness and reexamine the answers I once thought were obvious.

Rethinking Learning

My biggest realization about learning over the past two years is that the specialization of higher education has not prepared students with the professional skills needed for work. Instead, it often narrows their horizons and wastes far too much human potential. Without deliberate guidance from others or proactive exploration on our own, four years of professional education can easily trap us in a single-disciplinary viewpoint, or leave us relying only on plain common sense to observe the world. It is like Charlie Munger's metaphor of the person who only has a hammer and therefore sees every problem as a nail. With such a narrow mental model, it is impossible to find appropriate answers to the complex problems of the real world. Everyone should strive to arm themselves with the core ideas of multiple disciplines and build a diverse set of mental models.

My training in architecture gave me the perspective of a designer, but the two disciplines that have been most valuable to me are economics and psychology. For example, the concept of diminishing marginal utility taught me that instead of spending one hundred units of effort to understand one field completely, it is often better to spend twenty units of effort to understand eighty percent of it. The idea of marginal cost taught me that a profession like architecture, which sells time and cannot reduce marginal cost, is destined to be both exhausting and poorly paid. Cognitive bias in psychology helped me understand why so many decisions that look reasonable are in fact illogical. Looking at the world through the lenses of other disciplines almost always produces better explanations.

Ever since I realized this in my senior year, I have not opened a single book on architecture. Instead, I have spent nearly all of my time reading classics from other fields, and I have continued doing so ever since. It may be one of the wisest decisions I have made so far. Even my decision to go to graduate school was mainly because I felt I had not read enough yet, and once I entered society, it would be much harder to have such a long stretch of time to read.

The benefits of broad reading and learning for improving one's cognition are immense. Understanding macroeconomics and finance may not stop you from being harvested by the market, but at least it tells you exactly where you are being harvested. Understanding business models can help you choose to work for companies that make the most money, or at least let you explain clearly why your boss is being stupid when you complain about them. Understanding investment lets you look at the madness of crypto and recognize that businesses without cash flow are probably scams. Understanding marketing helps you hold back your wallet when Apple is once again telling a beautiful story about a new product. Or, more timely speaking, understanding politics helps you know that China is absolutely not going to admit fault and openly choose to coexist with the virus.

Specialization is for monkeys. Modern people should know at least a little bit about everything.

Rethinking Work

It is undeniable that most people work for money, and very few choose a job purely out of interest. If the goal is money, then industries and roles with higher pay naturally become the mainstream choice. The internet industry, which remains intensely competitive and still offers some of the best opportunities despite recent turbulence, is a perfect example. But before choosing to work for a giant company, shouldn't we first think carefully about what kind of life we actually want?

My biggest insight about work lately is that career choices should be reasoned backward from the kind of life you hope to live in the future. First decide what sort of life you want, and then choose a career path that can support it.

We always want to go to the best places and make more money. But what happens after earning that money? How do you want to live once you have enough? Many people board the ship of giant companies before ever thinking seriously about this question. They settle in first-tier cities where those companies are located, enjoy high salaries, but also carry massive mortgages. They navigate office politics carefully, write meaningless annual self-evaluations to prove their worth, and sit through countless inefficient meetings. Except for the small minority who rise into management, most of them also face the threat of becoming obsolete at thirty-five. If you think about it carefully, even if such work appears respectable, is that truly the life one wants?

At least for me, compared with this conventional and passive narrative of working life, I want more control over how I live and more freedom in life. Most people who bind themselves to that path explain it by saying that high-paying jobs only exist in first-tier cities like Beijing and Shanghai, where housing is astronomically expensive, and that those cities also offer the best social resources. But what if you only had to bear the living costs of a second-tier city while still earning the income of a first-tier city?

The pandemic forced many kinds of work to go remote, but remote work existed long before the pandemic and has long been practiced by many teams. From a career standpoint, if you can work for such a team and receive compensation that is competitive even in a first-tier city, then you can enjoy a much better quality of life in a second-tier city. But that kind of work arrangement is not common. Most industries still rely heavily on in-person collaboration, and on top of business constraints, there are all kinds of policy restrictions to deal with. So while this kind of life is possible, it requires intentional design. You need to actively choose a profession that supports such a way of working, deliberately build your remote-work abilities, and become familiar with the relevant policies instead of hoping that one day this ideal life will just happen automatically.

Besides whether a job supports remote work, what matters even more is whether it can deliver the kind of return you want, which means you have to judge the business model of the industry itself carefully. The best business models are those with extremely low marginal selling costs and stable cash flow. These products can be replicated almost infinitely without demanding much extra time or money, and they continue generating revenue from existing users instead of relying on one-off transactions. Naturally, selling digital products and services is the better option.

There are many kinds of digital products and services. You can build an audience and sell content, or you can build software and sell products. For me, I am more inclined to focus my career on software product development and design, because I love design and enjoy seeing products I designed get built and used by many people.

The reason I would not choose architecture as a career is, first, that architects early in their careers almost never have real influence over projects, especially before the age of thirty. I do not understand why one should spend the youngest, most energetic, and mentally agile years of life working mainly as a drafting tool with little need to think. Second, the impact of architecture is too limited and its production cycle is too long, so the sense of creative fulfillment is too easily worn away by the process. Finally, architecture is a service business with extremely high marginal costs, one that trades time directly for returns. Architects can hardly reuse what they have already created. From a business-model perspective, it is simply not a very good business, so the financial upside of the profession is limited as well.

After choosing an industry, it is also worth rethinking what kind of company to work for. A large company or a small one? Working for someone else or starting your own business? These are all critical questions.

The mainstream choice is of course to go to the largest platform you can get into. It pays well, looks good on your resume, and almost resembles the comforting certainty of state-owned enterprises in the last century. But on such a platform, your work will inevitably become a matter of tightening screws. Your time is spent polishing features that may not matter. Your energy is consumed by tedious processes and rules. Some projects may still not ship by the time you leave the company. You are unlikely to develop close collaboration with people across departments, and you are unlikely to understand the full set of functions needed to build a business of your own: product, engineering, operations, marketing, sales, customer support, legal, and more. The skill tree you level up at a big company makes you very good at surviving in another big company, but it may also take away your chance to build your own product.

In a small company, if you join the right people, you can gain far more than you would in a large one. You may not have the same infrastructure or budget, and the company itself may not even survive three to five years, but you can work shoulder to shoulder with people you truly admire. Your perspective opens up through cross-functional collaboration, and you get to learn from them how a company is actually built. The camaraderie forged in a small team fighting together for the life or death of a business is far deeper than the superficial collegiality of big-company coworkers enjoying free snacks and internal gyms. That kind of experience can easily become the best memory of your entire working life. Looking back, the most valuable time in my undergraduate years came after I had secured graduate school admission, when I worked with the Pivot Studio team to build 1037 Treehole. That experience still shapes how I think about work. After having built a product with a small team, I now feel I may never be able to walk the path of big-company work again.

The word "entrepreneurship" seems to have been excessively dramatized by venture capital institutions, because good businesses do not necessarily need funding or reckless expansion, nor do they always involve constant life-or-death moments. A book that has influenced me deeply lately is Company of One, which argues that with modern automation tools and distribution channels, a skilled individual can build a business of their own quite well. Of course, you may not literally need only one person, but you certainly do not want too many people on the core team. Expansion means higher costs, and when your business cannot support those rising costs, you may turn to outside funding that compromises the company's independence and freedom. That may not be what you want. It certainly is not what I want. If you choose the right kind of product to build, and the company's operating costs only need to cover the living expenses of a few partners, then even a small team can be highly resilient. Ironically, risk is always labeled as something borne by entrepreneurs, but in reality the people bearing the greatest risk are often middle-aged employees in giant companies in first-tier cities, with huge mortgages, elderly parents, and children to support. They have nearly lost the window of opportunity to start their own business, and their ability model may no longer support such a move. Once layoffs hit, as they recently have, the consequences can be devastating.

At the end of the day, work is about creating value for society. Only by providing value can a person live better themselves. No matter which path you choose, you should first ask yourself what kind of life you ultimately want.

Rethinking Life

When it comes to lifestyle, I think there are mainly two modes. One is engaged with the world: actively participating in social relationships and climbing the social ladder, putting more time and energy into outward connections. Many professions, such as teachers, doctors, civil servants, and corporate executives, belong to this type. The other is detached from the world: building channels of passive income so that you can live like a drifting cloud or a wild crane, free from dependence on social structures.

I am naturally drawn to the latter kind of life. I prefer nature over cities, books and films over socializing, freedom over order. My introverted personality makes me prefer communicating through writing and voice rather than face to face, and my need for deep work makes it hard for me to tolerate environmental interference.

Only when a person respects their own personality and traits in making life choices can they arrive at a beautiful life. For me right now, my ideal future is to live in a city like Chengdu or Dali, places rich in everyday life and close to nature, to build a business I can truly control, and to work with a trusted team of around a dozen people to develop several small software products that operate and earn money globally through remote work. That way, I can do work I enjoy at my own pace without pressure, while also being free to take several weeks off at any time to spend with family and friends or travel around the world without disrupting work.

What is real wealth in life? I do not think it is money, nor power. It is the freedom to make your own choices at any time.

This essay is dedicated to you, who are striving on your own path in life.